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A soldier stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was recently discharged from military service after admitting to having modeled for Dink Flamingo's Active Duty, a production entity specializing in military-themed gay porn. The unnamed recruit had been assigned to the 1st Battalion of the 321st Artillery Regiment. A video in which he appeared had surfaced among the "Streaming Videos of the Week" at ActiveDuty.com.

The incident sent a wave of embarrassment rippling through the US Army's chain of command. The soldier's dismissal occurred 14 months after a much-publicized crackdown on the extracurricular porn activities of personnel stationed at Fort Bragg, following allegations dating back several years.

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arly in 2006, seven paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division were identified as participants in videos available to paying customers at ActiveDuty.com ("Hot American Soldiers Having Wild Gay Sex!"). The Army's response was designed to make examples of the seven men and point their colleagues toward more decorous off-duty sidelines.

Four of the soldiers were disciplined extrajudicially -- confined to Fort Bragg for 45 days at half pay, reduced in rank to private, and dishonorably discharged. Because the Army is not required to name employees subjected to administrative punishment, the four remain anonymous.

The remaining three, however, received the notoriety that goes with court-martial proceedings. In May 2006, Pvt. Kagen B. Mullen was charged with offenses including sodomy, pandering, adultery, and engaging in sexual acts for pay. He admitted to accepting $7,500 for performing homosexual acts sex on camera and to marijuana use. In exchange for a guilty plea, most of the charges were dropped, and Mullen's sentence -- potentially a year in prison -- was abridged to 90 days' detention, a two-thirds reduction in pay, and a bad-conduct discharge. Pfc. Richard Ashley also pleaded guilty, and received a similar sentence.

Pfc. Wesley K. Mitten, 21, the last to go on trial, was identified by Army prosecutors as the "ringleader." Following a 2005 e-mail exchange with Active Duty producer Dennis Ashe, Mitten had agreed to appear in films, photos, and live interactive Internet broadcasts -- and to encourage other members of his unit to follow suit.

Pleading guilty to charges of sodomy, drug use, and conduct detrimental to the US Army, Mitten apologized for his actions. "I am sorry for disgracing my family name and my unit," he said, according to the Fayetteville Observer, the newspaper of record in the civilian town adjacent to Fort Bragg. "I wish I could take it all back." Mitten also received three months in the stockade, reduced pay, and dismissal from military service.

ActiveDuty.com, which had been registered to D. Ashe in Fayetteville, was reported to have shut down after the 2006 incidents, but it remains in business at a new location. "I'm not sure where they are now," an employee at Marina Pacific, Active Duty's video distributor, said recently. "All we do is distribute their products."

Many of Marina Pacific's offerings cater to uniform fetishists and fans of clean-cut, hard-bodied ultra-masculinity. The company is owned by Nicholas Boyias, who has described himself as a "Republican, NRA-supporting, churchgoing parent of four." A past president of the Free Speech Coalition, a legal resource focused on the First Amendment issues of the adult entertainment industry, Boyias has for years been a frequent donor to the Republican National Committee.

Less is known about Active Duty's Dennis Ashe, who could not be reached for comment. ActiveDuty.com.appears to be the work of an entrepreneur of some intelligence. Its carefully crafted terms of service officially decline to admit government agents, law enforcement officials, military investigators, agents of the Defense Department, reporters, and anyone visiting the site for any purpose other than personal entertainment. The terms and disclaimers may lend Ashe's site some legal protection, but do little to shield the authentically military models it displays. It might appear that an Army investigator's visit to a website in search of members of the rank-and-file constitutes "asking" -- forbidden in the age of "don't ask, don't tell." But as long as the question isn't "Are you gay?" it probably does not.

Bulging fruits of basic training

Whatever the risks, underpaid warriors from all branches of the US military have for decades been supplementing their incomes by making porn, most typically jerk-off loops produced for a gay audience. Before the Internet revolution, a young soldier could masturbate on camera for pay and almost always get away with it, knowing that the result would get limited, sub-radar circulation. In 1993, Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton near Oceanside, California, were publicly implicated in porn production, but such incidents were rare.

Several studios specializing in gay erotica, such as The Body Shoppe (Celebrating US Military Cock) and Dirk Yates's All Worlds Video (The Few, the Proud, the Naked), were founded on the eagerness of soldiers, sailors, and Marines to show off physiques perfected by rigorous training. Most came from bases in and around San Diego, which was and remains the epicenter of military-themed pornography.

Most military models appear in one or two films and are never seen again. The majority present themselves as straight; a few are willingly gay-for-pay. Some, such as ex-Marine Rod Barry -- a onetime Dirk Yates military model who has gone on to appear in over 100 films -- turn to porn soon after their enlistments come to an end, but while they still retain their servicemen's cachet.

A few have sought porn careers while on active duty, sometimes as a means of thumbing their noses at military regulations. During a four-month period in 1995, while serving in the Marine Corps with the rank of captain, Richard W. Merritt, who is openly gay, made eight sex films under the name Danny Orlis (after the hero of a fiction series aimed at Christian youth). In his 2005 memoir Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star, Merritt says his porn stint was motivated by his fury over the Clinton Administration's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. Merritt was not identified as "Danny Orlis" until after his military career had come to an end. Honorably discharged, he attended law school and became an attorney.

Other military porn models have been less fortunate. In 2005, after French Connection model Mark Kraynak left the Army, he went to work at Remington's, a Toronto gay strip club. That summer, he and fellow dancer Steve Wright apparently fell to their deaths in a quarry next to an after-hours club they were visiting in the Montreal suburb of Laval. An 82nd Airborne alumnus awarded a Purple Heart for service in Iraq, Kraynak appeared under the pseudonym Rex in at least two Active Duty films in 2004 while he was stationed at Fort Bragg. The circumstances of Kraynak's death, which may not have been accidental, have been cited by some officials as proof of the wages of sin. The incident has been used to enhance the disrepute of ActiveDuty.com, though Kraynak was no longer involved with the site at the time of his fatal fall.

The post-discharge fates of the Fort Bragg Active Duty models disciplined in 2006 and 2007 are undocumented, though Private Mullen, married and the father of an infant daughter, was known at the time of his court martial to have been pursuing a divorce. None is known to have continued modeling since leaving military service.

The Army's eagerness to dissociate itself from these men has a marked hypocritical taint. As a respondent called ReallyEvilCanine recently observed in a posting at TheRegister.co.uk, a tech news web site, "The same division nailed for wanton prisoner abuse at Mercury base near Fallujah feels 'dishonored' because one of their members did something legal with his member. Up is down, black is white."